In the fact of nationality itself there is nothing which necessarily tends to a breach of the peace. We know that it represents no fact of organic inheritance which is bound to perpetuate divisions of an unfriendly or unneighbourly kind between peoples. There is no modern “nation” which can claim homogeneity of racial origin, of language, of religion. It describes a political unity within which a people by the simple process of living together has developed and is continuing to develop a particular way of life and quality of culture. The peculiar colour of national life is due of course to some extent to its geographical location, to the circumstances of its history, and to its natural resources, but national unity is achieved in the evolution of a common tradition and a common culture. Nor is it possible to fix any real bounds to the growth of a nation. It is a historical commonplace how the small primitive groupings of man have steadily grown in extent until we have reached the stage of vast aggregations of polyglot peoples comprehended under a single national name—like the British Empire and the United States. The “nation” possesses no fixity, and national feeling undergoes continual change and modification as the result of changing circumstances. There are many like the present writer whose early schooling left them with the impression that there was a necessary and permanent antagonism of interest between the British and French; but since then the Entente Cordiale and other momentous happenings have completely banished that hoary tradition from the British mind. It is, moreover, not open to question that the increase and improvement of means of communication have done much to dispel the ignorance from which national prejudice and international suspicion drew their strength. The biological judgment upon nationality is pertinent to this point: “All the most important agencies producing the divergent modification of the nations are human products and can be altered.”[46] These agencies are presumably the factors which constitute what Mr. Benjamin Kidd called social heredity; and he has shown with great force how possible it is to “impose the elements of a new social heredity” on a whole people and to change its character accordingly.[47] The sum of the matter is that nationality is a fluid and changing entity; and its intrinsic nature and its history appear to point to the conclusion that it is a necessary stage in the evolution of human society, by which the caveman is to become at last a citizen of the world. There is nothing to justify the expectation that present national characters and national frontiers will remain as permanent factors in the life of the world. Footnote 46: Chalmers Mitchell, _Evolution and the War_, p. 90. Footnote 47: Benjamin Kidd, _The Science of Power_, p. 305.